1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a stained glass article, and more particularly to a three dimensional stained glass article produced by uniting stained glass pieces together, and a method for producing the same.
2. Description of the Background Art
Various stained glass articles are produced by cutting colored glass plates into glass pieces of various shapes and sizes, and by welding the glass pieces to one another via lead frames to joint the glass pieces together. The combination of glass pieces of various colors, shapes and sizes together with the lead frames that distinctively contour the shape of each glass piece exhibits excellent decorativeness.
Some of the stained glass articles are of two dimensional shape produced by merely uniting the glass pieces together via lead frames. They are mainly used in a window, which is generally of a flat shape, because the glass pieces constituting the stained glass article are flat.
Stained glass articles of a three dimensional shape (hereinafter merely referred to as 3D stained glass article) are also popular and used in various fields. In producing such 3D stained glass articles, glass plates are cut into a number of flat glass pieces (two-dimensional polygons including a triangle), and these flat glass pieces are jointed together via lead frames in such a manner that the adjoining glass pieces are bonded at a certain angular position relative to each other to configure a 3D object. Thus, 3D stained glass articles constructed by uniting the two-dimensional polygons together have been produced.
The shape of the above conventional 3D stained glass articles is limited, since the finished product could not shape into a sphere due to the production method of merely jointing the flat glass pieces together. Accordingly, even if trying to imitate the spherical shape of objects existing in the nature or to create spherical objects, the finished products could not satisfy the desired configuration.
There has been proposed another technology of producing a 3D stained glass article by using a great amount of glass pieces of small sizes with an effort to configure the finished product as round as possible. However, this arrangement increases the number of glass pieces used in producing the article, resulting in a cumbersome operation of assembling the glass pieces together.
Further, the above arrangement greatly reduces the ratio of glass component in the finished product, because the adjoining glass pieces need to be jointed via a lead frame, and a great number of lead frames are used in the finished product. Thereby, another problem has occurred that the reduced ratio of glass component mars the beauty inherent to stained glass article, and thus the quality of finished product deteriorates in an aesthetic viewpoint.
Furthermore, in the case where the conventional 3D stained glass article is used as a lamp shade, uniform illumination could not be obtained for the following reasons. The glass pieces constituting the lamp shade are all flat, jointed one another at a certain angular inclination, hence making the outer surface of the finished product discontinuous. Thereby, the intensity of light passing the surface of the stained glass article varies greatly between the adjacent flat surfaces that are united by the discontinuous portion. This results in non-uniform illumination.